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Rating: A year after reconciling with his brand "The Waterboys" and the release of "A Rock In The Weary Land," Mike Scott in 2001 decided to focus on the old outtakes from the "golden period" around the conception of his most famous album, "Fisherman's Blues." It's possible that Scott didn't feel at peace with himself without bringing these pieces to light. It might also have been a crude commercial operation, and if today Scott is mistaken for an Irishman, it's certainly not because he has red hair and freckles!
But we reviewers and real men are perfectly capable of focusing solely on the music, the recreated atmospheres, the evoked sensations, the revived images. "Too Close To Heaven," as clearly stated in the subtitle, recalls the music, the atmospheres, and the musical style of "Fisherman's Blues." But what is, what kind of music is "fisherman's blues"? Stating that the fisherman in question deals with plaice, hake, and Atlantic cod, his blues, born in Spiddal, Eire, is a Celtic folk that, with its traditional instruments, takes to the sea, faces the storms, and reaches the States, encountering good blues. It's folk pop that blends with country sounds and tastes; it's the traditional composed a millennium ago by some unknown, to which Scott has added or replaced the lyrics; it's a historical piece reinterpreted; it's the use of "lilting" for pop purposes. And it's a tribute to the great Van Morrison.
Having clarified this, one can only wonder whether "Too Close To Heaven" resembles its predecessor. Considering that in the United States the album was released as "Fisherman's Blues II," it would indeed seem so, but the answer is, of course, absolutely negative. If, in the former, it was Ireland that traveled and discovered America, here it's America making the reverse journey. The results are totally different. And inferior.
There are tracks like "Blues For Your Baby," "Custer's Blues" and "Tenderfootin'" which are standard blues, I would say metropolitan from the '80s. They would have fit perfectly inside the second Waterboys album, "A Pagan Place", arranged in a normal manner. But on an album that claims to resemble "Fisherman's Blues," the atmospheres do indeed matter, and in the small Spiddal, there is no room for a New York skyscraper. Simply placing a fiddle (violin) instead of a keyboard and a fuzz mandolin instead of any electric guitar is not enough to be what it once was. "Higher In Time", rock epic cooked marinara style, has also been rearranged, just like the folk rock of "The Ladder", which doesn't even belong to that period but is an outtake from the earlier "This Is The Sea". The songs may or may not have the atmospheres of that famous album, but why on earth should there be outtakes of other albums? Just because, once in Spiddal, Mike Scott tried to resound them with folk instruments?
Dead on target are the opener "On My Way To Heaven", a traditional that had various titles and lyrics (it seems that in Ireland they are short on ideas), to which Scott provides a new title, lyrics, and arrangements, and the title track, twelve minutes of "fisherman's soul". It seems indeed evident that there was an attempt to recreate/evoke the soul/prayer of Ben E. King, Toussaint McCall, and honorable colleagues.
After that album, Scott and company remained in Spiddal and released, in '88, "Room To Roam," an album with the same inclinations but less successful. In '87, straddling the two albums, "Good Man Gone" was born, finally a clear example of the music that should have been in this album. OK, it may not be exactly "Fisherman's Blues" but it was still born in Spiddal. Here: if the album had indicated "The unreleased SPIDDAL sessions" instead of citing the album of glory, it would have been correct. The sessions carried out (of tracks born even twenty years earlier, who cares, after all, there are also the traditionals here!) in that precise place in the world. Certainly, the appeal of "Fisherman's Blues" would have been missing... Also delightful is the cover of the epic "A Home In The Meadow" (the desert western that resembles, once every quarter of a century, the green moor) and the concluding "Lonesome Old Wind", the wind-Waterboys with some Morriconian passages.
The songs are not bad; the listening is certainly not easy, but the intensity is there. It's just a matter of placement. Since these famous sessions have been partially re-recorded, re-sung, since some tracks didn't have complete lyrics until 2001, couldn't Mr. Scott accept playing a rock piece as rock, a blues track as blues, thus leaving the "fisherman's blues" key to the real "fisherman's blues" tracks? Who knows what the Spiddal community thought that year?
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